Spaces of Feeling: Affect and Awareness in Modernist Literature

By Marta Figlerowicz

Can other people notice our affects more easily than we do? In Spaces of Feeling, Marta Figlerowicz examines modernist novels and poems that treat this possibility as electrifying, but also deeply disturbing. Their characters and lyric speakers are undone, Figlerowicz posits, by the realization that they depend on others to solve their inward affective conundrums—and that, to these other people, their feelings often do not seem mysterious at all.

Spaces of Feeling features close readings of works by Virginia Woolf, James Baldwin, John Ashbery, Ralph Ellison, Marcel Proust, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sylvia Plath, and Wallace Stevens. Figlerowicz points out that these poets and novelists often place their protagonists in domestic spaces—such as bedrooms, living rooms, and basements—in which their cognitive dependence on other characters inhabiting these spaces becomes clear. Figlerowicz highlights the diversity of aesthetic and sociopolitical contexts in which these affective dependencies become central to these authors' representations of selfhood. By setting these novels and poems in conversation with the work of contemporary theorists, she illuminates pressing and unanswered questions about subjectivity.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Release date: Dec 15, 2017
• ISBN: 9781501714238

Book preview

SPACES OF FEELING

Affect and Awareness in Modernist Literature

MARTA FIGLEROWICZ

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS

ITHACA AND LONDON

For Michael

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. Threshold

2. Living Room

3. Bedroom

4. Basement

5. Mirror

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I first began to formulate the ideas that became this book at the University of California, Berkeley. Spaces of Feeling would never have come into being without the advice and support of my many mentors and colleagues there. Since we first met in 2010, Dorothy Hale has been an adviser and a friend to me of a kind that I could not have dreamt of. Charles Altieri, David Bates, and John R. Searle engaged with early versions of this manuscript in a way that continually forced me to revise and reexamine my views; I often think back to our many conversations with wonder and gratitude. Other Berkeley faculty members and graduate students who generously commented on parts of this project include Elizabeth Abel, Oliver Arnold, Juliana Chow, C. F. S. Creasy, Anne-Lise François, Jordan Greenwald, Suzanne Guerlac, Jennifer Hudin and the Berkeley Social Ontology Group, Martin Jay, Matt Langione, Manya Lempert, David Marno, D. A. Miller, Kent Puckett, Jennifer Pranolo, C. Namwali Serpell, Peter Skafish, Janet Sorensen, and Adeline Tran. For their friendship during my graduate school years and beyond, I thank Sanders Creasy, Gaby Wyatt, Pete Skafish, Ryan Perry, Simon Porzak, Jordan Greenwald, Zak Manfredi, Sarah Johnson and James Marks, Padma Maitland, Christopher Miller, Jennifer Hudin, and Jennifer Pranolo. I am also grateful to the University of California for its generous financial support in the form of a Michele McNellis Fellowship, a Mellon-Berkeley Fellowship, and a Dean’s Normative Time Fellowship.

This project came to fruition during my time as a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows and an Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature and English at Yale. At Harvard, I thank Elaine Scarry for both her advice and her friendship; Kelly Katz, Diana Morse, and Yesim Erdman for helping me make the most of my time at the Yellow House and the Green House; Michaela Bronstein, Len Gutkin, Daniel Williams, and the American Literature Colloquium for reading successive drafts of these chapters; Hillary Chute, Noah Feldman, Stephen Osadetz, and Maria Tatar for many productive conversations. I also thank Daniel Williams, Len Gutkin, Scott Kominers, Michaela Bronstein, and Chris Grobe for numberless evenings of discussion and scotch.

At Yale, I thank Dudley Andrew, Marijeta Bozovic, Ben Glazer, Martin Hägglund, Langdon Hammer, Margaret Homans, Amy Hungerford and her graduate student working group, David Quint, Ayesha Ramachandran, Jill Richards, Katie Trumpener, Michael Warner, and Sunny Xiang for engaging with later versions of this book and for supporting me as I revised it during my first years of teaching. I cannot thank enough Heather K. Love and Lee Edelman, without whose intellectual generosity and careful engagement I would never have been able to bring Spaces of Feeling to its final form. Ayesha, Giuseppe, Zazie, and Viola, Marijeta and Tim, Jill, Mary Jane, and Dave: you make my time in New Haven a true pleasure.

Cornell University Press shepherded this book to publication with grace and generosity. I thank Peter J. Potter and Mahinder S. Kingra as well as my two anonymous readers, all of whom showed much open-mindedness and patience as the theoretical framing of this project kept changing. I was extraordinarily lucky to have worked with them and their editorial team. This book was published with the assistance of the Frederick W. Hilles Publication Fund of Yale University.

Finally, I thank my family, old and new: my parents Magdalena and Marek, my sister Matylda, my grandmother Maria, and Jackie, Alan, and Matthew. This book is dedicated to my partner, Michael M. Weinstein, who read and edited drafts of it many times over. Michael might never manage to teach me how to cook, but he makes me a better writer, and a better person, daily—and the life we share makes this work worthwhile.

INTRODUCTION

In James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room, an American tourist named David finds himself talking to another man at a gay bar in Paris. David looks around, and it hits him: everyone in this room knows that he and the other man are flirting. Moreover, everyone knew this long before he himself realized it. I knew that they were watching, had been watching both of us, David repeats to himself. They knew that they had witnessed a beginning.¹

The possibility that someone else might notice my affect before I do is built into its very definition. Unlike their more commonly invoked counterpart, feelings, affects are not immediately or even necessarily conscious. A delay often exists between the moment when an affect begins to inflect a person’s mind and body and the moment when she becomes cognizant of its effects, if she ever does. To demonstrate this delay, Brian Massumi famously invokes scientific test subjects strapped into encephalograph machines and timers.² This multiply mediated analysis supposedly shows that an intention can form in one’s brain before one becomes consciously capable of voicing it. I would contend that experiences like the one Baldwin attributes to David (whether or not we see them as neurologically inevitable) are at least as formative as the ones pursued by these experiments to how affects shape our daily phenomenology and our understanding of ourselves. Indeed, what else but such experiences might make one conduct empirical trials of affective cognition in the first place? Because we often do not immediately discern our affects, they lay us open to the people around us. The gap between our affective expression and our awareness of it makes us vulnerable to our environments. It also casts doubt on whether we are always the best judges of what we bring forth into them.

The men surrounding David and his lover-to-be Giovanni neither further nor impede their courtship. Despite David’s preoccupation with their gazes, they act as if this interaction—which astounds him—were merely commonplace. And yet, David’s self-discovery seems to depend quite strictly on this apparently indifferent, just casually curious group. A great part of his shock comes from the way the other people’s knowing looks help him articulate something about himself without their even intending or trying to do so. He relies on them to reach this insight about his affects’ names and stakes.

Spaces of Feeling examines a series of modernist novels and poems that make such distributed forms of affective awareness central to their depictions of personhood. I engage with these works to illustrate reasons why the dispersed, intersubjective access we have to our affects should figure more prominently in the philosophical and political frameworks we build around affective expression and self-scrutiny. Affects have long been described as subverting our sense of ourselves as coherent subjects because of the delayed conscious access we have to them. I stress that they also undercut our pretense of autonomy in even belatedly interpreting our bodily and mental states. Furthermore, affects give rise to a tension between our dependence on others for our self-awareness, and these others’ relative lack of concern about whether or not we can explicate our feelings to ourselves.

The term affect was coined by psychoanalysts to describe an external view of the analysand’s mind and body. Implicit even in its origins is thus the possibility that some parts of our inward selves were not (and maybe could not have been) discernible by our own lights alone. On an abstract level this observation is rather obvious: we did not ourselves invent the language through which we describe our feelings. But a less obvious, and—as Baldwin’s depiction of David shows—quite unsettling version of this statement is that the empirical or deictic act of registering something as intimate as our own affective experience cannot always be accomplished without outside help. There are some parts of our felt sense of self that we only remark on through their resonances in the bodies and minds of others. This claim becomes even more troubling if these other people’s capacity to notice parts of our minds and bodies does not usually translate into an equally deep investment or even interest in the affects that we find confusing. Indeed, sometimes the people by whose interpretations of our affects we feel unprecedentedly recognized and interpellated might not have intended to have that effect on us at all, even when they are not actively hostile to what our self-expression signifies to them. I integrate these paradoxes into an understanding of our relationships to others that steers away both from illusions of our subjective inscrutability and autonomy, and of the intrinsic broad interest of our inner states. I also argue that charting a course between these two fantasies constitutes one of the more significant and complicated problems in our intersubjective relations.

Early- and mid-twentieth-century Anglophone and French literature stages many episodes like the one I just described, in which an outward environment, or another person, prompts characters and speakers to recognize a gap between their affective effusions and the introspective awareness they have of these affects. These poems and novels depict most of their speakers and characters as strongly wedded to a notion of themselves as capable—if not of fully controlling their minds and bodies—then at least of retroactively observing and interpreting them on their own. The revealed dependence of their insight into themselves on outward, contingent encounters leads to a provocative uncertainty about the extent to which a more autonomous form of affective introspection would be possible for them at all. It also gives rise, in the works I examine, to an appreciation of how unrelated our own quests for affective self-awareness often are to the cares and concerns of those around us. Spaces of Feeling examines works by James Baldwin, Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Wallace Stevens, Sylvia Plath, Ralph Ellison, and John Ashbery. These writers are not typically known for their depictions of affects as insights into our uncontrolled blind spots and inward limitations—and indeed, their work is also rife with moments when affective expression leads to personal empowerment and enriched mutual understanding. Many of them also highlight, and criticize, the hostility with which a community might actively disregard some of its members’ affects and the needs that these affects indicate. I show, however, that these authors’ better-known preoccupation with what E. M. Forster famously describes as an injunction to only connect frequently has an additional, more ironic undertone. These writers also capture moments when a character or speaker awkwardly tries to gather herself back into coherence in the midst of her overwhelming feelings, finding she cannot do so without external help. These episodes do not subvert the value of entering into and contributing to affective exchanges, whether for political or for personal reasons. But they depict characters’ and speakers’ cognitive reliance on the people around them as vulnerably necessary because of their affects’ inarticulateness and unpredictability. They also draw attention to incomplete overlaps between the different senses in which these represented beings are connected to or disconnected from, reliant on or independent of others—and to the misunderstandings that collapsing these various categories of relation or dependence can create.

These characters’ and speakers’ reflections on their cognitive processes instantiate a long-standing theme of literary representation. However, the authors whom I examine reshape this tradition by redefining self-awareness to include knowledge of our dependence on, and exposure to, contingent surrounding environments and the people within them. Placing their characters and speakers in living rooms, bedrooms, and basements, on thresholds and in front of mirrors, they stage instances when other people seem better able to convey the content and significance of what a speaker or character is feeling than she herself can. The relative enclosure of these domestic settings, along with the promise of intimacy they foster, highlights the limits of these characters’ or speakers’ control over the ways in which and effects to which their affects become noticeable to others. The stable, knowable sense of one’s boundaries suggested by a threshold or a bedroom is unachievable to them even if they self-identify with these limits and enclosures very strongly. Indeed, these well-bounded spatial correlatives for the forms of self-reflection they want to nurture ultimately highlight the great difference that another person’s presence makes to their sense of themselves. These enclosed spaces represent the process of naming and interpreting one’s affects as one not simply of self-assertion, but of ongoing negotiations and exchanges between the self and its communities—indifferent as these communities often are to the self’s affective ruminations.

Someone might remark on my affect before I do, or might discern an aspect of it that eludes me. Out of this simple, even quotidian observation, the writers in Spaces of Feeling mount a series of challenges to the interpretative autonomy of our bodies and minds as well as to the strength of ties that bind our introspective efforts to others. We tend to have our intersubjective relations to others all backward; their works ironically suggest: people notice more about our affects than we might imagine but are also much less concerned than we assume about what they see. In psychoanalytic terms, these novels and poems make the so-called unconscious seem fearsome and scandalous not only (the way it is more typically read) as a crisis of rational will, but also—more importantly to them—as a crisis of even very suspicious and self-questioning introspection as a mode of knowledge. Our own efforts might not be able to substitute for the effects of outside input about how we feel: this possibility is both mesmerizing and frightening to the authors I examine here, because it makes even the most immediate kinds of inward self-scrutiny—what contemporary theorists might call autoaffection—seem like inevitably collective, cognitively distributed endeavors, even if only one person’s stakes in them are consistently deep. Such a view of affect further suggests that, even though others are sometimes actively hostile to the affects we want to explore and affirm in ourselves, our sense of aloneness in our introspective efforts does not always, necessarily, stem from such outward hostility. Its more basic, inalienable cause is simply that we care more about our affects than anybody else could. The alternative model of intersubjectivity projected by their works involves acknowledging both our need for other people’s engagement in making sense of our feelings and our inability to control the forms that their help, or the reciprocal insights they derive from us, might take.³

As it attempts to reassess our attitudes toward how others figure in our personal affective reflections, Spaces of Feeling considers cognitions and representations of affects rather than affects in themselves. I do not focus just on the experience of having affects, as many theorists before me have done, but on the process of becoming aware of them. As my title—spaces of feeling—might already suggest, I am less interested in the unconscious rawness of affective experiences than in the means by which they make their way into our or somebody else’s consciousness.⁴ For these reasons, Spaces of Feeling reflects on representations of affective and cognitive experiences attributed to literary characters and speakers, and not on the affects these representations might be attempting to incite or approximate. Rather than focusing on readerly affective responses to these works or on authorial psychology, I analyze these poems’ and novels’ internal perspectives on affects and their means of conveying these perspectives. The mediated nature of affects depicted in literature has at times made contemporary theory wary of poems and novels as modes of affective inquiry. Indeed, the represented affects I examine exist in the realm of what Massumi would call parables of affective experience.⁵ Inevitably framed and structured within some form and genre, they model bodily experiences and their rise to awareness in a partial, aestheticized fashion. In examining these early- and mid-twentieth-century works, I therefore do not aim to explore what affects are in their essence, but to increase our intellectual flexibility in engaging with the paths by which they make their way into our consciousness and our forms of representation.⁶

In so doing, I also offer novels and poems (these specific ones, but also their genres in general) as especially fruitful grounds for inquiry into such intersubjective dimensions of our self-knowledge. This is paradoxically not because they disclose our inward selves more clearly than other forms of expression, but because they help us address these introspective selves’ partial artifice (an artifice that the novels and poems I examine question with particular commitment). At the same time, as a form of engagement with literature, Spaces of Feeling inverts many of the reasons why and modes in which we might conventionally turn to works of literature for insight into intersubjectivity. I see novels and poems not only as paths toward exploring the radical otherness of other people, but also as ways of considering how vulnerable and open we are to (and how intensely desirous we sometimes are of) having our bodily and mental states discerned and interpreted by others. These literary works also help me highlight alternative strategies of social subversion—or alternative means of diagnosing the structural effects of homophobia or racism—that depend both on affirming the feelings of the disenfranchised and on stressing and generalizing from the inconsistency of a person’s capacity to interpret her affects on her own.

These questions of affective awareness and its intersubjective dimensions are related but irreducible to the moral issue of how we manage our affective expression in consideration of the presence of others. My approach to affects is, of course, indebted to the work of moral psychologists and philosophers such as Paul Bloom and Martha Nussbaum, who ask how we incorporate feelings—little as we can often do to control them—into our sense of ourselves. But the range of confusing affects in which I am interested is also far greater than just the ones that produce measurable communal effects. Indeed, I argue that we are often unable to involve other people in taking stock of our feelings as fully and intensely as we need them to be—and this inability is one of the points of difficulty in our relations to others that I emphasize.

In its regard for such more fleeting and apparently inconsequential affective experiences, Spaces of Feeling responds more directly to discussions that are ongoing in the field of affect theory. These discussions concern the subject position of a person who seeks to describe the larger meanings and stakes of mental and bodily experiences that she also believes to exceed and precede her capacity to become aware of them. Affect theory may at first appear merely to continue the long twentieth-century critical tradition of mining personal experiences for political or critical insights: one might see it as simply shifting the scale of these personal experiences to the microlevel of fleeting moods and ambiances. But in its increased emphasis on the partial unknowability of our bodily and mental responsiveness, this branch of theory also invites questions about how one can reliably put such uncontrolled, transitory, and only belatedly and partly cognized experiences to broader critical use. These questions become most pressing when the affect theorist does not adopt the safer, if somewhat patronizing, role of other people’s unsolicited analyst and includes her own body and mind among the inspirations of her affective reflections. To think of our affects as potentially exceeding our immediate awareness offers a strong argument for why examining them might add to our understanding of ourselves; however, to admit to the confusion into which affects throw us also casts doubt on our capacity to tell idiosyncratic affective experiences apart from socially pervasive ones, or contingently from structurally triggered ones, given that they can all be hard for us to notice and untangle. Once we acknowledge how unaware we are of many parts of ourselves, we do not just increase the amount of unknown forms and content we might discover in ourselves. We also draw heightened attention to the unreliability of the consciousness within which such affective self-discoveries take place and receive interpretations: an unreliability that becomes even more troubling when we propose that the outcomes of a particular person’s affective self-analyses are important to the self-understanding of others whether or not her expression impacted them directly. One might respond that, in this sense, the proof of affect theory is always in the response it elicits in its audience, who may or may not recognize themselves in a given theorist’s picture of affective experience. But such an answer merely obscures the disjuncture between this profession of selflessness and the more personal needs for clarification by which the theorist is often also driven. It also refuses to engage with the kinds of judgments—or refusals of judgment—that go into deciding that explicating one’s particular affective confusions might have intrinsic broader significance and stakes.

This last point could be put—and has been put—much more harshly. "If you can’t understand, just try